Welcome aboard. Please fasten your seat belts. Flight attendants, prepare for take-off. We are experiencing heavy turbulence, please keep your seat belts fastened. In preparation for landing, please return seats to upright position. Thank you for choosing our airlines. We hope to see you again soon. These are all phrases frequently heard aboard airplanes. Behind those instructions often lies the beginning of a new adventure. A honeymoon, an academic conference, backpacking or even a destination wedding.
Instructions come from the pilot cabin, an adjacent world where captains embark on new and different adventures everyday.
Chris Boyer, 68, retired from his piloting job from Air Canada in 2012. He has been flying for over 50 years, adding up to a total of 28,000 hours at the helm of clouds.
“Looking back now I did not really anticipate to have such a career as I had,” Boyer said. “I would say I was a little bit lucky. I always say I never really worked a day in my life.”
Boyer grew up in southern Ontario, but he moved around the province to Toronto, Sarnia and Kingston because his father worked in the construction industry. He said he obtained his private pilot’s license after high school.
Boyer’s interest in flying commercially stemmed when he was working at an engineering firm in British Columbia that involved commercial flying.
“When I was in Vancouver I decided to sign up for commercial courses and that took about six months,” Boyer said. “I got my license and did a lot of tourist flying, flying small planes and taking people to tourist camps.”
Boyer said he used to do a lot of bush flying before he flew commercial airplanes. He said although bush flying was more physically demanding, he enjoyed loading the plane and fuelling it.
“I think going from being a charter pilot to the airlines because there is more academia involved. You have to understand everything about an airplane and they give you courses on the aircraft type you are training on,” Boyer said.
“It is all new, so it is like a stepping stone every time you go into something different in position from co-pilot to captain. There is a lot of training and you are always wondering if you are up to task, but if you work on it, you usually work your way up.”
Boyer said he flew domestically all over north America, south America, Europe and Asia.
I would say my favourite place just to fly was in Europe,” Boyer said. “I enjoyed London, Frankfurt, Munich and Paris.”
In the 50 years Boyer has been piloting, he said he never had to deal with anything extremely serious in nature because most aircrafts have backup systems. However, there were some instances when he had some malfunctions.
“I once had to land in a remote lake and wait to get rescued and we had to fix the engine in the bush. That was interesting. One time when I was flying the Boeing 767, we had a malfunction and a bit of a fire in one of the electrical components, but we were able to use procedures before it turned to anything serious.”
Boyer’s favourite aircraft is the Boeing 767 because he was able to enjoy the modern technology while still being able to do some work himself.
“It is my favourite because it still had a lot of the modern computerization and navigation system so they worked a lot easier so it was very nice to fly this aircraft,” Boyer said. “The more modern airplanes are so computerized that there is very little actual flying. You keep it on autopilot almost all the time.”
Boyer now lives in Fort Frances, a town he said is the best-kept secret in north America.
“It is a very nice town and it is not too overpopulated. I spent a lot of my time in cities all over the world, but I’m not really a city person. I don’t really like crowds and traffic,” Boyer said.
“You can go to the lake, you can do winter activities or summer activities. Everything is so close. In a city like Toronto you have to travel hours sometimes to get to what we have. I have always enjoyed that about being here. Flying brought me here, otherwise I would have probably never come to [Fort Frances].”
